Is What You See Real? Change Your Perception, Change Your Life

Did you know that much of your reality only exists because you were taught it existed? And, if you were taught something else, your reality would be completely different. What if even the colors you see and the sounds you hear only exist for you because you were told that is what they are. If another person were taught something else, they would see different colors and hear different sounds than you.

The truth is, most of what you perceive is only perceivable to you because you learned to perceive it that way. A person from a different culture may see different colors, and definitely hears different sounds than you if they speak a different language. This is actually quite easy to prove. I will give you some proof later on, but first, think about the implications of this.

Experience follows perception. One person sees a movie and perceives it as a wonderful film. They have, therefore, a wonderful experience watching the film. Another person perceives the film as a piece of trash. What do you think their experience will be? You can find an infinite number of examples of this. Depending on how you perceive something, or someone, you will have a different experience. If your experience depends on your perception, and what you perceive may or may not have anything to do with what really is, and has more to do with what you have been taught, how much does your conditioning affect your experience? And, if you want a better experience in life, what can you do?

Let me give you a real life example of how your condition controls even what colors you see. When I was a graduate student I was on a scholarship living in Japan studying cultural anthropology. For part-time work I translated manuals from Japanese into English. On one occasion I was translating a manual that said in Japanese, “To start the machine push the ‘aoi’ button.” Because I didn’t actually have the physical machine in front of me I didn’t know how to translate the Japanese word ‘aoi.’ The word ‘aoi’ in Japanese can mean both blue and green!

Therefore, a native Japanese speaker will point to a ‘blue’ sky and say it is ‘aoi’. They will then point to a ‘green’ leaf and say it is the same color – ‘aoi’. Blue and green are the same color to the Japanese. Why? Because that is how they were taught and everyone in Japanese Society agreed on the color.

Now, in modern Japan, due to mass media, they have more words for colors, many borrowed from English such as ‘buru’, from the English word blue, and so on. But, before mass media, Japanese saw colors differently than English speakers simply because that is the way the culture arbitrarily defined it. Blue and Green are next to each other on the color spectrum. And, there are an infinite number of ways the range of blue-green could be divided up and given words. But, as it turns out, English speakers divide the range into two basic colors, blue and green, and Japanese speakers call the same range, one color, ‘aoi’.

But what is most profound about this is that traditionally, the Japanese only saw one color, where English speaker see two basic colors.

The same is true for the sounds we here. If you are reading this, you probably speak English. English has many different sounds that don’t exist as distinctive features in other languages. Using Japanese as an example again, a Japanese does not hear the difference between an ‘l’ sound and an ‘r’ sound. To a Japanese ‘fried rice’ and ‘fried lice’ sound the same. So does ‘s***’ and ‘sheet’. There are many other examples, but the fact is that you only perceive what you hear the way you have been taught to perceive it. And, this may have nothing to do with reality or what is.

It should go without saying that there are many sounds that English speakers are unable to hear that speakers of other language do hear. How a culture divides up the infinite field of reality is mostly arbitrary and there is no right or wrong in it.

There are Direct Knowledge and Mystery Schools that have understood this from ancient times and with this knowledge set out to find out what was real. The Toltecs, for example, who were known as men and women of knowledge in Mesoamerica, looked at the totality of creation as an infinite number of strands of light. They knew that what human beings perceived was only a small portion of these infinite strands. They way humans perceived things was by what Toltecs called ‘assembling’ a group of strands into something perceptible.

This stands to reason when we look at the infinite number of light frequencies there are. The visible light spectrum is only a tiny range of all light frequencies. But, humans are not able to see with their eyes beyond this tiny range. And, even within this range, depending on the culture or language a human is taught, they will divide up (assemble) the spectrum differently than someone from another culture or language background. Therefore English speakers see blue and green, and Japanese speakers see ‘aoi’, for the same range.

The various colors a person sees depend on what they were conditioned and taught to see. The same is true for sound. There are an infinite number of sound frequencies. Humans are only able to hear a fraction of those frequencies. And, within that tiny range they can hear, they hear differently depending on their conditioning and language. Every culture or language assembles the frequencies into different groups of perception.

The Toltecs knew that this was not limited to what a person hears or sees, but in fact applies to all of reality. Within the totality of all that exists, human beings are able to perceive only a small fraction, and within that small fraction each person will perceive the same reality differently depending on their conditioning, whether that conditioning be cultural, education, language, family values and so on.

In the next chapter I will be talking about how this knowledge can be used to create the life you desire.

Replies to This Discussion

How interesting! My mother use to say, as far back as I can remember, "who was the one that determined that tree meant tree & that it wasn't a bad word like s***?" and many similar statements in the same stream of thought. I've pondered the same things many times & many ppl have found it either endearing or frustrating how I can read a name of a business, or a phrase & see something totally different or funny in it. Even in school teachers would ask what we thought an author or an artist was trying to say & I got a lot of "hmm, never thought of it like that, can see what you are saying but, that's not the right answer". That always frustrated me.